Monday, September 10, 2018

Loyalty programs go decentralized - with the Raincheck ICO...

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that 2018 is shaping up to be biggest growth year for e-commerce to date. Amazon stock is through the roof, several of your friends own Shopify stores, and you actually do buy your pet food online. You are probably have things you need to order from Amazon right now.

And yet, statistics show that the majority of retail purchases still happen in brick and mortar stores. We’re not quite ready to purchase all our clothing and shoes without seeing and trying them on first. Raincheck is a company that began in 2014 to aggregate data between online and offline stores (O2O) and in turn use that information to help the growth of e-commerce. It was a method to track and predict product sales and online product discovery.

With RainToken, they are attempting to take on the issue of loyalty credits. Loyalty credits are the digital points you receive for shopping frequently at the same store, whether it is in airline miles or cash-back programs. While these points often function as a digital currency, there’s no way to transfer or exchange them between businesses. RainToken is a shot at creating a marketplace for these assets through the trade and transfer of Raintokens on the Stellar blockchain.

Loyalty points can credit card schemes will still exist, but Raincheck is hoping to turn the status quo into a decentralized ledger where these points can be swapped for their tokens. While most people are members of a loyalty program, very few actually use or redeem their credits. The idea is that a marketplace for sharing these points will lead to more usage, more loyalty, and more shopping.

These tokens will essentially be smart contracts. The Stellar chain was chosen because of it’s fast speed, low transaction fees, and micro-transaction focus. Stellar upholds strict KYC identification standards and is proven when it comes to security. The Stellar blockchain is purposely simple, as opposed to Ethereum’s flexible and complicated smart contract network.

The public token sale begins in Q4 for this year. Raincheck plans to have a mobile wallet, a cash-back system, and a full ledger completed before 2020. If you are interested in learning more about the platform or the history of Raincheck, visit Raintoken.org